In the process of shipping an item from one location to another, a protective packaging material is typically placed in the shipping carton or box, to fill any voids and/or to cushion the item during the shipping process. One such protective packaging material is air filled cushions/pillows. Air filled pillows may be produced by a variety of commercially available air pillow production machines.
One practice of handling, i.e. conveying, and storing air pillows for their use after their production is to utilize a mechanical conveyor, i.e. conveyor belt, which mechanically conveys the air pillows from the air pillow production machine to a storage hopper. Another method is to pneumatically convey the air pillows to the storage hopper. In either event, a packer pulls the end of the string of air pillows from the storage hopper and then tears off a selected length, assisted by the perforations which separate adjacent air pillows, to place in the box.
It is desirable to eliminate the step of manually tearing off a selected length of the air pillows.